The Fedora 41 version of Asahi Linux is out – the go-to Linux distro for Apple Silicon Macs.
Fedora Asahi Remix 41 is the latest version of Fedora for Macs with Apple’s M1 or M2 SoCs. As we covered last year, Fedora is the official flagship version of Asahi Linux, which is the effort to make Linux a first-class native OS for Macs based on the Arm64 instruction set.
The previous release, based on Fedora 40, appeared in May – it’s a major effort and tends to lag slightly behind the upstream Fedora releases. Existing users can update, and new users need simply run a single shell command to get started. Apple Silicon Macs are very much not simply “PCs with an Arm chip”, so it’s not just a matter of writing a USB key and booting off it.
Version 41 picks up all the enhancements from Fedora 41, which was released just over a month ago. So, it has kernel 6.11, version 5 of the DNF package-management tool, and KDE Plasma 6.2 as the default desktop. A version with GNOME 47 is also available, but remember that Asahi is heavily biased towards Wayland so for the moment you shouldn’t plan on running any X11-based environment.
This verson has a new graphics driver which is compliant with the recently announced Vulkan 1.4 specification. (For non-graphics folks, Vulkan is the modern replacement for OpenGL.)
It also has a built-in x86 emulation environment, which the developers described in detail back in October. This combines multiple layers to emulate an x86 environment in a VM, then the Windows API on that, then special graphics drivers to translate DirectX API calls into Vulkan calls.
The result is that users can run some of the latest AAA-class games on Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. This is undeniably pretty impressive stuff, even if this grumpy old vulture has no interest in doing it himself.
The Reg FOSS desk upgraded the installation of version 40 on his M1-based MacBook Air. First we did a dnf upgrade -y to fully update the existing installation, rebooted, then tried to install the upgrade from the KDE Discover app store. There were a few glitches – first time around, Discover complained about errors and wouldn’t install the upgrade, but a reboot fixed that.
It works fine, it feels if anything slightly faster, and in our humble opinion still looks and feels extremely clunky compared to macOS. If, however, you need to run Linux on the fastest Arm64 kit around, this is the best option. As we described last year, though, it’s possible to install other distros this way as well, such as Ubuntu Asahi – but the same limitations around X11-based GUIs apply. ®
